The American Finance Association elected Kenneth French, a professor of finance at the Tuck School of Business, as its next president. French, who has been a member of the AFA for 20 years, will serve as president for a one-year term.
According to French, the AFA's two most critical tasks are publishing The Journal of Finance and an annual meeting for many of the association's members. Aside from those two responsibilities, the AFA actually does little else, he said.
"Their organization is less active than you might imagine," he said. "It's not as if we're the Democratic Party out there trying to proactively do anything."
Despite the title, French said that the role of President does not actually have very many responsibilities. Mostly, he said, his role will be to "resolve duties as they arise over the course of the year."
"Last year we had an issue that I ended up investing a lot of my time trying to resolve and it was a complicated quasi-legal issue," he said, though he was not serving as president during that time. "Those are the sorts of things that you don't know what's going to come up."
The president has only indirect control over the Journal of Finance. French will have the power to appoint editors for the journal who then determine which submissions will be published.
"We appointed a new editor last year and he has a three-year term so fortunately I don't have to do that," he said.
At Tuck, French teaches investment courses, which this past term attracted almost half of Tuck's second year students. He also consults with Dimensional Fund Advisors, a Santa Monica investment firm.
Under the AFA's election rules, candidates first run for vice president, and the winner then runs unopposed to become the president-elect.
The AFA, whose mission provides for "the mutual association of persons with an interest in finance" and "the study of finance in colleges and universities," was founded in 1939 and today has 8,000 members.
"The AFA is the association that most finance professors around the world would be members of," French said.
